ABSTRACT
Working their way back north, by mid-1944 the pair were in Carruthersville, Missouri, a town north of Memphis, nestled in the corner of the state near northeast Arkansas. The pianist Sunnyland Slim had established himself quite comfortably there, with two houses, one in the city and another out in the country. A half-white patron who went by the name "Juke" had set the enterprising Sunnyland up with a whiskey and gambling joint. Sunnyland also had a woman named Enid, "a good looking dark gal, " Edwards writes. "Tall and heavy, built like a stallion, hair all puffed up on her head." Honeyboy and Walter were playing on the street when Sunnyland happened along, spotted them, and invited them to sit in that night on his gig at the seawall down by the levee. Enid came in later, "and damn if she didn't fall for Walter ... Walter starts slipping around with her. Sunnyland gets mad, but hell, ain't no man going to turn down no woman. Sunnyland got mad, me and Walter had to go back to playing on street corners." A few weeks later, the duo were playing a little club in town when Sunnyland turned up in the audience, and spent a long time staring at them without saying a word. Having apparently weighed the relative merits ofhooking up with them versus rejecting them in favor of Enid, Sunnyland finally approached them. "Hey man, come on out to where I'm playing at," he said, Edwards writes. "I'm not gonna fallout with you over no goddam woman. If that woman wants you, she wants you. She ain't nothing to me, nothing but a goddamed whore anyway."The trio was back in business, and Walter was with Enid, Honeyboy remembers, "clean until we left town. We wouldn't carry nobody with us when we left, though!" And ofcourse, the leaving was inevitable.
